Blotto

(1930)

This is one of those films that was shot three times. One in English, and once with Laurel and Hardy reading Spanish cue cards, La vida nocturns, and still again in French, Une nuit extravagante. (See my review of Be Big!)
This is one of their very best. Once more they are escaping from a henpecking wife, Mrs. Laurel, to go out on the town. She has a bottle of bootleg booze which Stan intends to purloin. But she is wise to them, and pours out the liquor and substitutes tea, plus everything else in the kitchen. They sneak out, go to a nightclub, spike their drinks, and down the hatch. And after a puzzled moment, here’s the genius … they get drunk! The idea of the booze is enough. But it gets better. Wife comes in with a shotgun in a case and sits behind them. And they go into a laughing jag. I mean, they laugh for ten minutes, and it gets funnier and funnier. No one in the movies could laugh like Stan Laurel, and Oliver Hardy was a close second.
The wife finally has enough, and they flee, get into a cab. She fires the gun at the cab, and we get one more of their classic car scenes. They did everything to a car one could possibly do in their films. They cut one in half by driving it through a sawmill. They bent one into an arc so it could only go in a circle. They had one scrunched up between two streetcars so it was only about three feet long. (That one can still be seen at the Peterson Auto Museum in LA.) Here, the cab comes apart. I mean, every weld, every nut and bolt, every screw just lets go and it falls into its component parts. That must have been so hard to set up, because it happens in seconds. What a way to end a two-reeler.